News

David Peck's San Diego-based Reelin’ In The Years Productions has joined with Dutch production company Double 2 BV to buy the rich archives of Countdown, the Dutch television program that from 1977 to 1993 was Europe’s leading showcase of popular rock music, and to make it available for licensing to filmmakers, television producers, and other entertainment-industry clients.

While countries commonly require that books be deposited in a national library, upon publication, that appears to be less the case with films and other audiovisual publications. To get a sense of how common such requirements are, and where, is the goal of a new project: an ambitious survey of audiovisual-deposit laws around the world.

To the growing stable of online, streaming film services, add one more – one that the Wall Street Journal has dubbed “Netflix for film nerds.” FilmStruck, a collaboration of Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection, at least initially available only in the US, will emphasize art and cult films from independent film companies, but will also offer some Hollywood studio products.

If your city has Home Movie Day 2016 events, they are likely to be taking place in the next week or two. If your town does not celebrate Home Movie Day, the Center for Home Movies can show you how to change that.

Since 2012, the Albanian Cinema Project has been working to save the little-known legacy of Albanian film. Now it is expanding to help preserve the moving-image record of the whole of the Western Balkans, and is building regional partnerships among moving-image archives by holding workshops for archivists, the first during October, in Tirana, Albania. And it needs help to buy a film scanner that will stay in the region and enable high-resolution scanning of threatened films.

In the early years of motion pictures, movies were conveyed on nitrate film stock. That medium had a major shortcoming: it could burst into flame during projection. The Egyptian Theater in Hollywood is undergoing renovations that will make it possible for the facility to screen nitrate film regularly for the first time since the early 1950s.

Wheeler Winston Dixon applauds the return of nitrate-film projection to the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. He writes: "Projecting nitrate is certainly not without risk – it’s highly flammable, and needs to be treated with the greatest care during projection and preservation – but for more more than half a century it was the dominant medium for film production, and for quality of image, it simply is in a class by itself."

In its 2016 round of preservation grants, the National Film Preservation Foundation has awarded grants to 39 institutions to ensure the survival of 64 films, among them "The Streets of Greenwood" (1963), a documentary about civil rights activists registering African American voters in Mississippi, and James Blue’s "The Olive Trees of Justice" (1962), about the torn loyalties of an Algerian/French man during the Algerian civil war, which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

"Who's Crazy?," a 1965 film by Thomas White, a young American in Paris with performances by members of the Living Theater and soundtrack by Ornette Coleman, has turned up in a New York garage, and has been restored to throw light on experimental cinema of its day.

The Library of Congress has made its annual addition of 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, bringing the listing to 675 films dating from 1894 to 1997. The films named to the registry this year include Hollywood blockbusters, documentaries, silent movies, animation, shorts, independent and experimental motion pictures. They bring the number of films on the registry to 675, which certainly far from exhausts the potential for additions, because the Library’s moving-image collection runs to some 1.3 million items.